333 Miles (10 page)

– Dawson,
Dazed and Confused

Anyone who has ever driven to Las Vegas from
Los Angeles or San Diego knows that a certain amount of
anticipation builds to get to Barstow, California. Not because
there is anything remotely redeeming about Barstow, but because it
is a milestone which marks the fact that you are halfway to Vegas.
It is otherwise difficult to get excited about a city of just over
twenty-one thousand on the outskirts of the Mojave desert which
ranks as one of the ten poorest in California with over twenty
percent of its citizens below the poverty line.

Many people stop at one of the seemingly
infinite fast food choices, though if one was feeling particularly
fancy, he may choose to hold out for gyros at The Mad Greek sixty
miles away in Baker. Since the guys just had In-N-Out a half an
hour ago, and Roger was fully loaded up on Kodiak, there was no
reason to stop now. Alex blew through Barstow at eighty-two miles
an hour as 2Pac sang about the merits of living and dying in Los
Angeles. Out here, Los Angeles was already another universe. The
sky behind them had evolved into a collage of purples and oranges
as the sun prepared to relinquish her role for the day.

Alex looked out the side window and noticed a
new housing complex going up at the edge of town. “You could be
home now!” a billboard promoting the complex announced. “Yeah,
fucking great,” Alex said mostly to himself, wondering where one
would likely be coming home from.

“Can we turn the game on?” Roger asked.

Alex complied and hit a button on the
steering wheel which changed the audio from auxiliary to AM preset.
After a few minutes of a stalled Stanford drive resulting in a
punt, the score was announced. The Cardinal was down 13-3 midway
through the first half.

Roger combined his displeasure and
motivational speech into one concise statement: “Come on – pull it
together, you fucking cum-guzzling fucks!”

With that the group passed the last cluster
of fast food joints on the eastern edge of the town. This one
included a Carl’s Jr. (with a Green Burrito add-on), Jack in the
Box, Burger King and Taco Bell. Immediately past the exit was a
green sign indicating that Baker was fifty-nine miles away and Las
Vegas was now a hundred and fifty-two miles away.

“Rock n’ roll,” Alex said.

In the back seat, Mike decided to bum a
Kodiak from Roger after all. He clumsily packed it as a Stanford
cornerback intercepted a pass and returned it sixty-seven yards for
a touchdown, eliciting a round of applause from Roger. Mike pulled
his lip out and inserted the tobacco, spilling about a third of the
grains down the front of his Caminiti Padres jersey. As the extra
point was kicked, he spit once in his In-N-Out cup and brushed the
spilt chew off his chest and stomach and onto the leather seat
between him and Roger.

Interlude Six

Gary (14)

Midway through the summer of 1987, in
Thousand Oaks, California, Gary was feeling like quite the stud. At
thirteen years old, he had already been to second base with a girl.
Although it only happened once, and the girl, Millie Adams, had
kind of freaked out afterwards and said they could not do it again,
he was quite sure that he liked it and was also pretty sure that
she would change her mind. If not, he also had a sense that Susan
Andrews from his social studies class would let him try it
also.

By July 26
^th
, the night of his
friend Casey Wilson’s big sleepover party, school had been out for
over six weeks and seemed like a distant memory. Eighth grade
didn’t start for another five weeks, so Gary’s only concerns were
summer baseball and trying to get his hands back on Millie’s boobs.
Because he had no source of transportation and there were no social
events involving girls, the boobs were becoming less and less
important.

On this particular night, neither baseball
nor boobs mattered much. This was the second annual big sleepover
at Casey’s, whose parents were usually drunk by ten o’clock and
really didn’t care what the kids upstairs were doing as long as
they were not too loud and did not leave the house. One of the
other guys at the party, who was seriously named Larry Hagman, had
promised to bring a case of beer, but did not deliver. Some of the
guys were disappointed, but Gary, who had never had a beer in his
life, was glad and was looking forward to a fun night without
alcohol.

His vision involved the guys watching a movie
(maybe one with some decent nudity) until Casey’s parents were
asleep. Then there would be a round of pillow fights before
settling into a serious Nintendo RBI baseball tournament. Gary was
nearly unhittable if he got to play with the Mets, who had Dwight
Gooden and Bob Ojeda as starters with Roger McDowell and
submarine-throwing Jesse Orosco in the pen. He took it for granted
that he would win the RBI tournament. He was eliminated early in
the pillow fighting last year, however, and was anxious to fare
better this time.

Things were going very much according to plan
until about forty-five minutes into the pillow fights. Gary already
had two victories. Each match consisted of one round of five
minutes. The winner was determined by vote among the spectators,
unless one person chose to surrender early. Knocking your opponent
to the ground twice was considered a victory by technical knockout.
Getting hit once with a pillow is not a big deal, but being struck
repeatedly in the head could make one quite dizzy.

Gary had a long pillow case with a small hard
pillow bunched up in the end of it. This meant it was significantly
less maneuverable and it took longer to get the pillow head moving.
Gary was forced to take big, long swings. However, due to the
greater centrifugal force and extra mass at the end, his pillow
allowed for a much greater impact if he could connect. His first
fight was against a kid named Ryan who was not very athletic and
was an easy pushover. Actually, Gary was surprised Ryan was even
invited to the party to begin with.

Gary kept his swings to short circles by
choking up on the pillow case and repeatedly connected with blows
to Ryan’s stomach, occasionally mixing it up and going for the
head. Meanwhile, Ryan was playing more defense than anything and
only took a few offensive swings the whole five minutes. Gary
probably could have forced a knockout if he really tried, but was
satisfied to advance with an easy victory by decision and avoid
Ryan the embarrassment of getting knocked down. It was not a
challenge.

The second match, against Casey, was more
difficult. Casey was a well-skilled pillow fighter. For most of the
five-minute match, Casey was able to back away from Gary’s long
swings and then step in and deliver quick blows to Gary’s head with
his Chicago Bears pillow-cased pillow (Casey and his parents
originally were from Chicago).

However, with a minute left in the round,
Gary swung his pillow from the left side of his body to his right,
missing Casey by a good two feet. Casey didn’t realize this was an
intentional miss and that the pillow would be quickly be returning
from the other direction, this time with the full force of Gary’s
stronger right arm driving it. Casey stepped in to try to connect
with a short swing of his own.

Gary’s bunched-up pillow connected squarely
with the left side of Casey’s head. It was enough to cause Casey to
stumble backward, slightly dazed. Gary did not miss the
opportunity. He quickly swung his pillow around his left side and
over his head, bringing it back down on the top of Casey’s head
with an axe-chopping motion, driving Casey’s head down between his
knees. Gary then choked up and swung repeatedly from his right
side, delivering rapid blows. Casey was able to block most of these
shots with his pillow, but the damage was done. Though the outcome
was not a knockout, Gary was easily determined to be the
winner.

This only left Larry, who had won the event
last year. Gary expected a two- or three-minute break before the
final battle. However, during these next few minutes the course of
the night took an unexpected turn.

“As much as I would like to kick Gary’s ass
and win pillow fighting again this year, I think we should do
something a bit more grown-up,” Larry announced.

All of the other nine boys gathered at the
event stared at him in silence, wondering where this was going. “I
am sorry I didn’t score the beers like I hoped to,” Larry went on,
“but since we can’t get drunk, we should at least go toilet paper
someone’s house and fuck it up,” he finished, with a smile on his
face.

To win support of the idea, Larry also
announced that he and Casey had found a dead raccoon in the
backyard and they would set it on fire on the front doorstep of the
house being attacked.

Casey acknowledged that his parents had three
huge cases of toilet paper from Costco in the garage and probably
would not notice if one was missing. Also, Casey mentioned that
they could take the twelve eggs in the fridge if they made one of
the frying pans dirty to make it look like they cooked them for a
late snack.

Gary was not happy with this plan. He was
looking forward to his chance to defeat Larry in pillow fighting
and then kicking everyone’s ass in RBI. He also knew he could
probably talk everyone into throwing one or two dollars into a pool
for the RBI tournament. He figured if he won ten bucks he could add
twenty percent to his current net worth, most of which was safely
hidden at home under the sweater of his stuffed Winnie the Pooh
doll.

Gary tried to steer the night back toward his
original design, and even went so far as to call Larry a pussy for
trying to avoid finishing the pillow fight tournament. It did not
work. The toilet-papering idea had an unstoppable momentum. This
being America, a quick vote was taken. It was seven to three in
favor of toilet-papering. The decision was final.

One important choice remained. Whose house to
hit? After about three minutes of discussion, a target was
identified.

Patrick Zell was a sophomore at the local
high school. At the end of the last school year he had hooked up
with Casey’s seventh-grade girlfriend, Mindy Stewart. It was widely
known that Mindy had sucked his dick, but this tidbit was not
mentioned among the group of young adventurers planning their
mission from Casey Wilson’s bedroom.

The next thing Gary knew, he and Larry were
rifling through Casey’s dresser drawers trying to find dark clothes
to wear. Within minutes they were entirely clad in black, looking
something like pre-teen versions of Joe Pesci in
Home
Alone.

The ten boys took great care to sneak out of
the house quietly. Casey’s bedroom was a loft-like structure above
the garage. Once armed to their satisfaction, the group exited out
the window. One at a time, they climbed down a steeply slanted
section of the roof onto a fence that divided the front yard from
the back yard before dropping six feet into the soft bushes in the
front. Casey explained that this was important because it allowed
the group to silently enter the front yard without having to open
the very noisy gate. While this was true, the the group just as
easily could have walked out the front door. Casey’s parents had
mowed through three one-liter bottles of Fetzer White Zinfandel
before passing out around 11:15 p.m. They were in no position to
hear, or care, who was entering or leaving the property.

Gary touched down in the bushes last and
quickly scanned the horizon, searching for the rest of the platoon
which was now huddled behind a big oak tree in the front of the
yard. It took a few moments to find them because everyone was
wearing black and it was a dark, moonless night. Casey lived in one
of the original developments of Thousand Oaks and this section of
the city did not have street lights.

Gary waited for his eyes to adjust to the
darkness, noticing how much cooler it had become at night. The
temperature had dropped over thirty-five degrees from its peak of
ninety-four in the afternoon. A slight wind caused the trees to
rustle and created the feeling of being in the wilderness instead
of upper-middle-class Los Angeles suburbia. Gary thought he heard a
wolf howl in the distance but was not sure if it was real or if he
simply imagined it. He felt a stab of fear before reminding himself
the whole thing was no big deal. He blinked his eyes a few times
and then jogged over to the other guys.

Larry and Casey assumed leadership of the
operation and whispered instructions. The group was to maintain
zero visual contact with potential civilians. This meant that if
any cars came, everyone should meld into the darkness and remain
still until the threat passed. If they were spotted by a cop,
instructions were to hide if possible. If not, the order was to
scatter and avoid capture by any means. The meeting point was back
at the house but only after you were sure you were not being
followed. Larry reminded the group that Thousand Oaks cops were “a
bunch of lazy fucking pigs” so this pretty much just meant you had
to hop over a few backyard fences to get away. Casey solemnly
reminded the participants that anyone caught was on their own and
could in no way implicate the rest of the group. Larry threatened
serious physical harm to anyone who snitched and held up the
plastic bag holding the dead raccoon to emphasize the point. In the
darkness, Gary rolled his eyes at the overdramatic approach.

After a few more minutes of babble, Larry and
Casey got to the interesting part of the plan, what they would
actually do when they got there. Casey took the lead here, and it
finally occurred to Gary that this was a well-planned event and not
a spur-of-the-moment idea in the middle of the pillow fight
tournament. It seemed Casey was more upset about the Patrick Zell
situation than he had let on.